by Various
One of the tires caught the embankment. The car was thrown off balance. It jerked sideways, rubber screaming across pavement. And then inertia swallowed them whole, lifting the car off the ground and spinning it into a graceful pirouette.
There was nothing but silence.
Nobody cried out. For that brief moment, the world had gone soundless.
Then: the sickening crunch of metal against asphalt.
The creak and pop of safety glass.
The explosion and powdery stench of airbags.
The grinding of the roof against the road as they slid to a stop.
The first sound that breached the silence was Aimee’s hyperventilating. She tore at her seatbelt despite being upside down, determined to get out of the car if it was the last thing she did. Jack dangled from the driver’s seat, suspended in the air like an astronaut awaiting ignition. He imagined being paralyzed, wondered if it hurt to sever your spinal cord. Or to die in a car accident like this one. But he could hear Aimee thrashing. He could hear her crying. He couldn’t possibly be dead.
And then, a final assurance that he was still alive: Abigail began to scream.
That scream motivated Jack to tear himself free, to fumble with his seatbelt and shove open his door, tumbling onto the glass-speckled street like a clown rolling out of a circus car. Aimee kicked at her door as she screamed. If he had time to close his eyes, her cries would have convinced him that both Abby and Charlie were dead, smeared across the tarmac—roadkill left for the cleanup crew.
Jack got to Abby before Aimee crawled out of the car. He pulled open the back door and caught his eldest daughter around her waist, unbuckling her from the backseat and heaving her from the mangled wreck. Abby stopped screaming the moment she saw her mother. She started to bawl instead.
“What happened?” Aimee yelled. Her face twisted with panic. “Jack? What the hell happened?” She was trying to keep calm, but every word that clawed its way up her throat was a shriek.
Jack didn’t reply. He was busy dashing around the other side of the car, his heart stuck in his throat, threatening to choke him. Like a newborn baby fresh to the world, Abby had screamed and assured her parents that she was alive, but Charlie hadn’t made a sound. Not a whine, not a whimper.
His every nerve stood on end, buzzing with dread as he wrenched open the back door and stuck his head inside. To his relief, hovering over him like an overturned angel, Charlie dangled from her car seat, her hair hanging in her face.
“Hi, Daddy,” she said softly.
Jack’s heart swelled in his chest.
“Hi, baby,” he whispered back, fumbling with the seat’s latch, careful not to let her tumble out of his arms and onto the roof.
“Did we flip?” she asked, her arms around his neck. “Like in the movies?”
“Yeah,” he replied, only now remembering that reflective pair of eyes, the ones that had made him jerk the wheel in the first place. He hadn’t bothered to look and see if anything was lying dead in the road. Part of him hoped that whatever had caused this had been flattened by the Saturn’s front bumper. If the road was clear, he had half a mind to storm into the woods and find something to kill, if only to satiate his sudden compulsion for retribution.
Jack pulled Charlie from the car and set her down on her sneakered feet. Abby and Aimee wept into each other’s arms while Jack and Charlie stood silent, both of them transfixed by the smashed Saturn.
“Cool,” Charlie whispered under her breath, her eyes sparkling in the moonlight—eerily reminiscent of the eyes that had caused this chaos in the first place. That single word of childlike wonder thrust him out of his thoughts and back into reality, and for the briefest of moments, despite the circumstances, he tried not to laugh. The moment was cut short by Aimee’s shouting.
“Call the police,” she yelled. “What are you waiting for? Call the police!”
Jack patted down his pockets. Empty. His cell was missing. He ducked back inside the wreck, searched the bent roof of the car for his phone, and found it close to the backseat. Half expecting there to be no service, he imagined a psychopath bursting from the trees with an ax held over his head—that hitcher he’d saved by swerving was, coincidentally, a crazed killer looking for a nice family to julienne.
Reality was never as exciting as Hollywood. There was no killer, and Jack’s phone boasted four bars. He had an e-mail waiting. A missed called from Reagan no doubt, thanks to the Pizza-Rama band and their ear-shattering jam.
He dialed 911, reported the accident and their approximate location. Crouching beside a shaken Abigail, Jack wiped her tears from her cheeks while giving the dispatcher details of the incident. Nobody was hurt, but they’d send an ambulance anyway. A fire engine would arrive, accompanying a handful of police cruisers and eventually a tow truck that would drag the Saturn to its final resting place.
The thing was totaled, twisted like a tin can. Under different circumstances, Jack would have set its smashed frame on fire and danced around it like a devil around a bonfire. But instead of whooping with joy, he stared at it, waiting for it to come alive, waiting for the engine to rumble to life and mow them down like King’s Christine.
“What happened?” Aimee asked again, trying to compose herself before the cops arrived.
Jack shook his head, bewildered. “I thought I saw something. An animal.”
He looked back the way they came, squinted in the darkness, tried to spot a carcass in the road.
“It’s like the headlights just went out,” he said.
“They went out?”
“I think so…”
“You think? Jack, we could have been killed.” Aimee shoved the back of her hand against her damp cheek, swatting at her tears. “What were you thinking?”
“It was a reflex.”
“What, jerking the wheel instead of slamming on the brakes? Have you lost your goddamn mind?”
He saw something shift out of the corner of his eye, shot a look down the road again.
“Where’s Charlotte?” Aimee’s voice took on a sudden urgency. “Jack?”
Looking back to the car, Jack saw that Charlie wasn’t where he had left her. His eyes fluttered around the wreckage. He charged into motion, frantically scanning the perimeter of the accident.
“Charlotte?” Aimee called out, her voice shrill with panic. “Oh my God, where is she?”
Jack bolted down the road, his pulse hammering against his ears. Aimee’s whimpers grew fainter until she sounded like she was underwater, muffled and indiscernible. The air had grown thick and heavy, impenetrable by sound.
Jack finally spotted her. Charlie stood on the soft shoulder a few yards from the car, facing the trees.
“Thank Christ,” Jack murmured. “Charlie, what are you doing? Your mother is losing her mind.”
Charlotte looked at her father, then looked back to the trees with a furrowed brow.
“Something ran into the woods. Over there.” She lifted a hand and pointed a small finger at a tangle of trees.
He looked to where she pointed, his own eyebrows knitting together as he tried to spot movement in the darkness.
“Probably just an animal,” he assured her, taking Charlie’s hand into his own. “Come on, let’s get you back to your mom.”
Charlie reluctantly gave up her position, craning her neck while her dad led her back to the overturned car.
“It wasn’t an animal,” she murmured. “It walked on two legs, like us.”
Jack slowed his steps at Charlie’s description. His breath hitched in his throat. No, he thought. It was a hitcher. A goddamn hitcher who’s lucky to be walking at all. But his logic wasn’t very persuasive.
“I saw it, Daddy,” she told him, lowering her voice so her mom wouldn’t hear. “I saw it before the lights went out. I saw it just like you.”
• • •
It was well after midnight by the time the Winters arrived home. To Charlie’s delight, the officer who gave them a ride after repor
ts were filed ran his lights all the way home, turning the darkness around them into an electric wonderland of red and blue. Aimee put the girls to bed while Jack sat at the kitchen table, staring at Charlie’s high-bounce ball next to his coffee cup. Somehow, she had managed to hang on to it through the accident, having let it go only when her mother insisted it was time for bed. Uncurling her fingers from around the cheap rubber toy, Charlie had carefully placed it next to her father’s mug in a silent gesture of alliance. She had seen it too—the pair of eyes that had forced Jack to swerve and nearly kill his entire family.
Jack had seen those eyes before.
Aimee eventually stepped out of the girls’ room and quietly shut the door behind her. She took a seat across from Jack, holding her silence for a long while, but Jack knew what was coming. She wanted to know what happened. She wanted an answer that would satisfy her anger. Rather than ask the same question again, she caught Jack off guard with a statement instead.
“You could have killed them. Imagine it, Jack… Charlie dying on her sixth birthday.”
Jack blinked at her, stunned.
“Thanks,” he muttered. “I wasn’t feeling quite guilty enough.”
“You were falling asleep.”
“I was not.”
“I know you were. You’re just afraid to admit it.”
“What?”
“What do you expect, staying out all the time?”
“All the time?” Jack frowned. “Like what, once every two weeks?”
He shook his head, then lifted his cup and took a swig of cold coffee.
Aimee sat in silence, then got up and walked out of the kitchen without another word.
Jack decided to sleep on the couch.
It wasn’t the first time, and he doubted it would be the last.
• • •
The next morning Charlie refused to get out of bed.
“I’m sick,” she complained, tugging the covers up to her nose while Aimee pulled school clothes out of a dresser, tossing them onto Charlie’s bed, confirming that Charlie would be going to school today, no matter what had happened the night before.
“On your feet,” she said, yanking the covers off her daughter, who, at the shock of cold morning air, flailed atop her mattress like a waterlogged fish.
“But I don’t feel good,” Charlie whimpered. She sat up anyway, knowing her efforts were futile. Aimee was the last to budge when it came to school.
“Blame it on the piles of candy you ate yesterday. I told you it would make you sick, didn’t I?”
Charlie jutted out her bottom lip.
“Maybe someday you’ll learn to listen to your momma.”
“Maybe someday I’ll really be sick,” she muttered. “I mean really sick. Like green and dying and puking like…” She stuck her tongue out, twisting her face up in disgust. “Like that. And then you’ll be sorry.”
“Oh I will, will I?” Aimee tried not to grin.
“You might be dying,” Abigail chimed in from across the room. “But she’ll still send you to school.”
“Then I’ll die at school,” Charlie said matter-of-factly. “And all the kids will come to my funeral because the teachers will make them, like they make us go outside when the fire drill goes.”
“You can’t make people go to your funeral,” Abby said. “They only go if they feel like it.”
“They’ll feel like it.” Charlie pulled on a multicolored sock. “I’m gonna be buried in the sandbox next to the monkey bars. They’ll have to go because it’ll be during recess.”
Abigail rolled her eyes at her sister as Aimee pretended to busy herself in the girls’ closet, eavesdropping on their conversation.
“And if they don’t want to go they’ll have to stay inside,” Charlie continued, “even though it’s recess.” She paused, narrowed her eyes. “Because they’re jerks.”
“Charlotte.” Aimee shot her youngest a stern look. “Watch your mouth.”
“That isn’t even a bad word,” Charlie mulled. She yanked on her other sock and slid off her bed. “And I can’t watch my mouth because my eyes are stuck on my head, and my mouth is stuck on my head, and how do you watch your mouth if they’re both stuck on your head, huh?”
Aimee exhaled a steady breath and held Charlotte’s pants out, patiently waiting for her to stick her scrawny legs through the holes.
“Hurry up or you won’t have time for Lucky Charms,” she warned. “You too, Abby. Both of you are running late.”
The girls went silent while they dressed, zipping up zippers and pulling on T-shirts. Charlie fumbled with her shoelaces before throwing them down in frustration. After a minute of letting her struggle, Aimee plopped Charlie back onto the bed and tied her shoes for her.
“Momma?”
“Yeah, baby?”
Charlie frowned before raising her shoulders up to her ears. “Is Daddy OK?”
“What makes you ask that?” Aimee asked.
“The accident,” Charlie shrugged. “He looked really worried.”
“He was just worried that you and your sister might be hurt,” Aimee said with a smile. “You aren’t hurt, are you?”
Charlotte shook her head no.
“Good. Now hurry up and eat your breakfast. Grandma is giving you a ride to school today.”
• • •
Jack was worried. There was the accident and the mangled car—it was enough to worry anyone, especially since it was their only mode of transportation. But the twisted frame of that Saturn was the least of Jack’s concerns. What was really eating at him was that pair of eyes.
The first time Jack had seen those eyes had been along the outskirts of his parents’ Georgia property. The house was a run-down double-wide trailer, and its paint was peeling from decades of humid Southern heat. The siding was rusted over and popping its bolts, hanging from the bottom of the trailer like a silver-lined candy wrapper.
The property didn’t match the house. It was a great stretch of land: a good two acres, narrower than it was long. Those two acres of grassland stretched back for what seemed like an eternity, ending at a wall of trees.
Beyond those trees and a few hundred paces north, an old cemetery sat surrounded by a rusted iron fence. There were too many headstones for it to have belonged to a single family, yet not enough to have belonged to the small town of Rosewood, Georgia. The day Jack discovered that cemetery, he ran from it in search of his parents, but something kept him from revealing his discovery. As soon as he burst into the house, the urgency to tell them about what he’d found was replaced by a distinct need to keep it a secret—something only he knew about. He couldn’t explain his sudden change of heart. All he knew was that if he told, the cemetery would no longer be his. If he told his parents, it would be theirs too, and he wanted those headstones. Wanted every single one to himself.
Gilda and Stephen Winter weren’t prizewinning parents. That double-wide was an accurate representation of the way their household was run: sparingly and with little attention. They had been blessed with those two acres after one of Gilda’s family members had bitten the big one, but the shitty trailer was all Gilda and Stephen’s. They’d bought it off an old guy with one foot in the coffin a few months after she got pregnant, and even then that trailer was itching for the perfect moment to fall apart.
Moving to Rosewood wasn’t much of a change. They traded one nowhere Georgia town for another, hauled the already dilapidated trailer halfway across the state, and parked it on that inherited land; that was all it took for the Winters to officially become homeowners. A few months later they were homeowners with a kid.
Growing up, Jack didn’t have much guidance. He ran around in bare feet throughout most of the year, took a bath every few days—Gilda would throw him in the tub when she was no longer able to take the stink—and brushed his teeth only after seeing other kids do it on TV. He grew up wild, a modern-day Huck Finn. He’d run along the length of the property to the tree line, duck beneath a tangle of bran
ches, and spend afternoons among his secret friends: the dead.
Despite his youth, Jack knew that spending time alone in a cemetery was weird, but something kept drawing him back. Staying away for too long made him feel anxious, as though the wellspring of comfort was nestled among those graves. At first he only visited once or twice a month, but time turned him into a junkie. Eventually, he was there every day—sitting, talking to no one, throwing rocks and tearing wild grass from the earth.
It was there, among the moss-covered headstones and rusted wrought-iron fencing, that he first saw those eyes. After a day of kicking headstones out of boyhood boredom, Jack had picked himself up to leave for the night when he saw a pair of reflective black eyes staring at him from behind the trees—animal eyes, the kind that shone like silver dollars in the dead of night. Like two onyx marbles, they could have easily belonged to a wolf or a raccoon. But there was something off about them. They were soulless, empty, as if pulled from the pit of something twisted and unclean.
He wanted to run just like the day he’d discovered the cemetery in the first place. But like the time before, his initial reaction was overridden by the allure of secrecy. The fear that bubbled at the pit of his stomach went calm, and before he knew what he was doing he was walking away from home rather than toward it. He paused only when he came to realize what stood between him and the trees, between him and those eyes: a single grave marker—one that had taken the bulk of Jack’s abuse. He’d gone so far as to etch his name onto the weatherworn stone, nothing more than a thoughtless act of childhood vandalism. Jack stood paralyzed in front of his own grave.
Those eyes were the same eyes he’d seen just before the Saturn lifted off the road and flew through the sky. They were the eyes that changed his life forever. Jack knew those eyes, and it terrified him that they had found him again.
Chapter Two
PATRICIA had eventually forced herself to accept Jack as her son-in-law, but this accident was too much. Putting her daughter and grandchildren in danger? If Jack Winter thought Patricia Riley was going to turn a blind eye to his blatant recklessness, he had another think coming.